Authors: William Doughty
The bathroom was hopelessly sordid compared to this sunny view. Mary shuddered at the memories it awoke in her, a host of images and sensations and shocks and the absolute perfection of exquisite, tormented delight. She hoped she could find, by cleaning the bathroom, some kind of closure.
Everybody uses that word now, because in our hearts we know there is no such thing.
She took a deep breath, and started. Working quickly but methodically, she cleaned the walls, the three showers, without cubicles, along one wall, the windows, and the huge mirror. There were stainless-steel rings fitted to the walls. Mary polished these rings very carefully. She washed the tiles that covered most parts of the walls.
Contentment grew in her. Next she cleaned the sink and toilet, and after that she washed the empty water bed that lay folded in one corner. She polished the big black cupboard, now so empty, and she cleaned the blue, sand and white tiles on the floor that sloped very slightly, so that water would flow into the three drains. She cleaned the drain covers. Lastly, and most carefully of all, she cleaned the taps and rails and metal rings of the bath and then the bath itself: a scarlet metal rectangle with rounded corners. Some seven feet long, four feet wide, and nearly two feet deep, this was the bath that had been the setting for the supreme raptures and terrors.
Two years had passed since she had fled that house. The victim returns to the scene of the crime, thought Mary. No, she told herself. It was not that simple. If only it could be. She was more than a victim.
How much better the bathroom looked now! She felt a real pride and joy in her accomplishment. Everything sparkled and gleamed. Delightful. She took off her rubber work gloves and tossed them towards the locked door. Then she wondered what to do next. Even as she began to wonder, the answer came to her so clearly that she knew it had been in the back of her mind all along: she had to take a bath. She had an excuse, if she wanted an excuse, in the fact that she was hot and sweaty after all her determined exertions. She had to take a bath. It would be another step in overcoming her past.
Shivers of strangeness shuddered through her flesh as she put the plug in and turned on the water. Too much had happened here. It was impossible that she had returned to the scene of so many nightmares. Nobody could be so crazy.
Slowly she undressed, feeling a disturbing sense of unreality. Knowledge of her own extreme arousal and excitement flooded her all at once, so strong as to be almost unbearable. Naked, she faced herself in the big mirror, and saw defiance in her face as though she expected her own reflection to confront her with terrible accusations.
There she was, that was her all right. She could not help but admire herself in the mirror, and indeed to do anything else would have been a kind of dishonesty. Mary had a great body, tall and powerful, with long legs and full but firm breasts with large nipples that David had once loved to tease and torment. As she recalled this, they tingled and grew even bigger and harder. All her muscles were in good tone from the various kinds of exercise she pursued with such enthusiasm or, as some said, fanaticism, and this love of working out, together with her broad hips, gave her buttocks a gorgeously rounded and strong magnificence.
Her face was good too. Mary knew these truths about her body and face no matter what other doubts she had about herself. She played with her straight, shoulder-length dark-chestnut hair, veiling her face, peeking out between its strands, surprising herself with the look of a madwoman. Then she adopted her serious and composed look, and was the image of a confident and successful young businesswoman. Mary could look like all kinds of people, and often played this game with the mirror. She pretended to be an empress, and impressed herself with her look of imperious arrogance.
Who, she wondered, are all these people, and just what are they up to inside me? Which was her real face anyway?
Magic was in that glass, for David had often ordered her to stare at her own absolute humiliation. Now Mary posed before it, all alone. One after another she adopted the positions of restraint, suffering and worship. She could feel the exquisite constriction of her bonds squeezing her towards orgasm, feel David’s hands, mouth and cock on her helplessly immobilised flesh, and she could smell her own excitement and fear.
David, she thought. Now she realised that she had come to this house hoping to defy him. He would beg her to submit to him like in the old days, and she would refuse, assert her independence, and leave. Instead, he had insisted on telling her quickly that he had given up domination, and had told her to get out. Reality had failed to live up to Mary’s fantasy scenario. David was always ahead of her, just out of reach.
Slowly she moved her hand to her pussy, which felt swollen, tingly and possessed by a hunger that was hard to bear. Impossible.
‘Shit!’ Mary said to herself. Turning away from the mirror, she grabbed a black plastic bag containing part of David’s collection, and tipped it out on the floor.
Straps and ropes and cords, harnesses, helmets, suction devices, belts and gags, vibrators and probes and tubing, clamps and clips and dildos, syringes, brushes, whips and cuffs tumbled out along with three big black beetles. How dirty it all was. How hopeless and sad. Mould, slime, dirt and dust, rust and nastiness. It was sickening that all her orgasms and ordeals, those odysseys of the flesh and spirit, had come to this dismal end.
Diligently she set to work cleaning some items from David’s collection, and she experienced a series of stirrings and flashbacks as she handled each piece and recalled incidents of suffering and ecstasy. How expert David had once been! He had mesmerised her with his dynamism and skill, she had been his slave – and now he was nothing, nothing at all, and she too was clearly nothing to him. Not, of course, that she cared about him, or about what he thought. Now she was free and strong, she told herself. And there it was again: loneliness.
Mary cleaned just the items that caught her fancy, and laid them out in a neat row. Then she recalled seeing a bottle of bath foam liquid at the bottom of the cupboard, and she fetched this and poured what was left of it into the slowly filling bath. It was an old bottle that had not been touched for a long time, she observed. David had clearly given up his love of bizarre sex in a foamy bath, his own peculiar combination of fetishes. How could anyone abandon their deepest fantasies and longings so rich and strange? If you give up your own strangeness, what do you have left?
Serve him right that she had come to disturb him a little. After she left, taking with her some of these items from his collection, he would surely have to think about her sometimes. Yes, one night when he could not sleep and the full moon burned bright against the curtains, he would feel regret that he had lost her beauty and courage.
Mary sat down on the tiles near the big window in a slanting rectangle of sunlight that felt warm on her naked skin. There she drank her bottle of mineral water and ate two muesli bars, and she watched how intricately the leaves of the trees danced and wavered dark against the blue sky in the passing zephyrs, and she stared at a big glossy blackbird that sat on the fence and looked right back at her, and she thought about how she had just lost her job and her boyfriend Jack both, and so what, and she thought about David and all the insane things he and she had done, and she felt she ought to be very sad and unhappy right then, but instead she saw leaves and sunlight and the blackbird and she knew some kind of happiness, the kind that sneaks up on you without reason after a long period of miserable slow-motion suffering, the kind of unexpected contentment that hits you as the truth. Despite everything. Screw everything. Turn up the defiance.
Mary felt the time had come to go over to the offensive. She made her selection from the items she had cleaned, and then she put on a strong and broad black plastic belt, fastening its three buckles as tightly as she could, constricting her waist. Next she fitted a beautifully made torment bra of narrow, encircling, interconnected scarlet plastic straps, both strong and intricate, with shiny plastic rings for her nipples. Revelling in her excitement and anxiety, Mary fastened the twelve buckles of the cruel bra as tightly as she could, after pulling her taut nipples with some pleasing difficulty through the rings. How tautly the flesh of her tits bulged between the myriad straps of the bra! Breathing heavily, a sheen of sweat gleaming on her lovely young body, Mary admired herself in the mirror for two minutes, and her long fingers teased her breasts and pussy.
Fingers fumbling and clumsy with fear and anxious excitement, Mary took a long, thin red cotton cord, and tied the two ends of it to metal rings at the front of her belt so that a loop hung down.
She took a hot shower and then she knelt in front of the mirror and soaped every part of her exposed flesh, working up a good lather but refraining from granting herself orgasm. She was afraid of herself once more, but she no longer cared. After wetting a flannel in the bath, she lay it over her pussy. Wet heat, lovely.
Heart beating faster and faster, she pulled the loop of cord between her legs to her back, and then she put her wrists in the loop and twisted the cord around them so she not only had, after all this time, the exquisite thrill of feeling bound and helpless, but also the delight of feeling the cord press against her pussy, cushioned deliciously by the flannel. She lay face down on the tiled floor, and slid back and forth pretending to try to escape from three men who mocked her futile efforts and prepared to take turns in her cunt. Never had she tied herself up like this, and she had not planned to do it, but it had been an irresistible impulse. How exciting it was! Her body hummed with power and lust as she slid around the floor, lubricated with soap. Nothing was as sensual as this weird combination of bondage and soap in the bathroom where David had taught her strange lusts.
Gazing into the mirror she saw herself so helpless and vulnerable, a shiny female worm. She twisted the cord around her wrists to loosen it, and then she brought her legs up and back, finally managing to put her ankles inside the safe embrace of the cord. Now she felt even more helpless, and she could pretend to struggle even more, tensing her legs as well as her arms as though straining to escape, doing wonderful, cruel things to her pussy even as her nipples pressed against the cool tiles. She arched and tensed in exquisite constriction.
How impatient David must be getting! He wanted her out of his house, he must be wondering what the hell she was doing. Surely he suspected the truth. Soon he would bang on the locked bathroom door and, when she refused to open it, he must kick the door and shatter the flimsy lock. Then she would panic, and be unable to free herself before he bound her for real. How could he resist the temptation to punish her and use her beautiful, helpless body? Desperate to come, Mary writhed and wriggled about, rubbing her flesh on the soapy, slippery tiles. It was going to be difficult to come like this, and perhaps it would prove impossible, but Mary imagined that a cruel master – not David, but a better man – had given her exactly five minutes to try to have an orgasm, after which he would bind her spreadeagled to rings in the floor, and chastise her, not letting her come for many hours while he fucked a lovely young girl in the bath, gaining pleasure from Mary’s humiliation.
And this ideal master who was definitely not David had an assistant, a young male sadist learning the ropes, literally as well as figuratively. Now the assistant had to punish Mary.
She crawled slowly over the floor towards a scrubbing brush beside the bath, and got her left breast over its stiff plastic bristles, then ground down on it, punishing her teat that protruded so taut and provocative through the plastic ring of her harshly compressing bra. Slowly she writhed, and the cord pressured her pussy cruelly. She tried to plead for mercy through her gag, but all she could do was mumble and drool.
No, they would not have pity on her. Helplessness and suffering only excited these two strong men she had imagined, and their cocks got harder as they enjoyed her nude writhings in restraint. They would punish her in strange ways, and their huge stiff cocks would use her body uncaringly, doing anything they could imagine that would give them pleasure.
And Mary came with sickening force, squirming in her bonds like a tormented worm, her body and soul exploding in a rapture that was utterly overwhelming, an atrocity of ecstasy. Slowly, she freed herself from the cord and removed her gag, belt, and bra. Standing naked, she looked down at herself, and touched her belly and breasts, feeling the skin she lived inside.
So now she knew. The orgasm that had just thrilled her to the core had been more satisfying than any she had shared with Jack. In future she would just masturbate. No need to be bored by ordinary men like Jack, or frightened and hurt by strange men like David – not that there were other men like David. If what she needed was to be humiliated, restrained and chastised, she could do that little job herself. Think of all the trouble and disappointment she could avoid by being her own tormentor!
Masturbation was logical after all. Everybody was alone inside their own bodies and minds, and the idea of any kind of communication between human beings was only a comforting lie. It was time she learned how to live as very few people ever did live: without the facile, unreal support of illusions. Coming back to this damned bathroom of crazy David had been a good idea after all. The shock of seeing this chamber of horrors once more, after two years, had cleared her mind and helped her to understand herself, which meant she could understand everything.
True, the bath itself was formidable, even without David, its creator. It was huge. It was as red as fresh-spilled blood. Worst of all, it had shiny steel rings at its ends, sides and bottom, attachment points for restraint, and Mary knew how strong they were, how impossible to budge. David had told her with some kind of crazy pride that each of those rings had a metal root set deep into a metal frame that surrounded the bath. Yes, of course David was insane.